Sowell’s technical gauges remain quietly but firmly committed to a fully invested posture. Last week’s pullback may have interrupted Wall Street’s nine-week victory lap, but a single rough Friday does not invalidate months of improving market behavior. Markets occasionally remind investors that gravity still exists; the broader trend, however, remains intact. As always, our discipline is guided by evidence, not emotion, and the evidence continues to suggest that following the trend is a far more rewarding endeavor than following the day’s headlines.
Markets came into the week surfing a remarkable wave. The S&P 500 had just posted its ninth consecutive weekly gain, a feat that's happened exactly four times in the last four decades. The Nasdaq 100 had ripped 10.6% in May alone. The Dow finally cracked 51,000. Earnings season was practically a victory lap — 85% of S&P 500 companies beat EPS estimates, blended earnings growth clocked in at 28.6% year-over-year, the best pace since Q4 2021. By every measure, the bulls had the ball, the crowd behind them, and the wind at their backs. Then Friday happened.
The Setup: Computex Euphoria
The week opened with genuine excitement. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang — currently operating at roughly the same cultural altitude as a rock star — delivered his keynote at Computex 2026 in Taipei. He unveiled Nvidia's RTX Spark, the company's first-ever PC processor, a move that sent NVDA up 4.8% and put Intel and AMD squarely in the crosshairs. Huang also declared, with characteristic modesty, that Marvell Technology could be "the next trillion-dollar company." Marvell's stock surged 25% on the quote alone. That's the power of having the right person say the right thing on the right stage.
Early in the week, the mood was positively electric. The S&P 500 notched a record close above 7,600 on Tuesday — a milestone that would have seemed audacious at the start of the year. The Dow tacked on 229 points. Ten consecutive weekly gains. Even the bears had to admit the market was earning it.
The Rug Pull: Broadcom's "Good Enough" Wasn't
Then Broadcom reported earnings Wednesday evening, and Wall Street collectively remembered that in a momentum-driven market, "exceeding expectations" is no longer sufficient. You must exceed expectations, raise guidance, offer a gift basket, and possibly promise to name a chip after someone's golden retriever.
Broadcom's numbers were, objectively, extraordinary. Revenue of $22.19 billion — up 48% year-over-year. EPS beat. Fiscal Q3 revenue guidance of $16 billion that would represent 84% year-over-year growth. By any rational measure, a company most investors would kill to own.
But analyst estimates had penciled in $17.2 billion in AI chip sales guidance. Broadcom gave them $16 billion. Worse, CEO Hock Tan declined to raise the full-year AI semiconductor sales forecast. The market, having priced in perfection, received merely excellence — and responded by wiping roughly $350 billion in market cap in a single session as Broadcom shares fell 14% on Thursday.
The contagion spread with brutal efficiency. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index plunged by more than 10% on Friday. Marvell — yes, the same Marvell that had surged 25% earlier in the week on Jensen Huang's blessing — cratered 16%. Micron fell 13%. Intel and AMD each dropped around 11%. Nvidia shed nearly 6%. The sector that had carried the broader market's advance all year was now leading the retreat, and it was taking everything with it.
The Accelerant: Jobs Day
If Broadcom lit the match, the May jobs report on Friday morning handed the market a can of gasoline.
Nonfarm payrolls came in at 172,000 for May — well above forecasts. Unemployment held steady at 4.3%. On paper, this is good news. A healthy labor market. Economic resilience. The kind of data that, in a normal cycle, would be cause for mild celebration.
However, "strong economy" is code for "the Fed isn't cutting rates anytime soon," and "the Fed isn't cutting rates" is code for "yields stay high," and "yields stay high" is code for "those richly valued AI names look a lot less attractive." The 10-year Treasury yield jumped back above 4.5%. The 30-year breached 5%. The VIX — Wall Street's fear gauge — exploded 34% higher on the day, finishing above 20 for the first time in months.
By the closing bell, the Nasdaq had fallen 4.18%, its worst single session since April 2025. The S&P 500 gave up 2.64%. The Dow, somewhat insulated by its old-economy composition, limited the damage to 1.35%. For the week, the S&P 500 surrendered more than 2% — erasing most of what had been a promising few days. The ten-consecutive-weekly-gains streak? Gone.
It wasn't a total bloodbath, though. Of the S&P 500's top 10 largest stocks, nine fell on the day — and then there was Berkshire Hathaway, sitting in the corner with a cup of coffee, posting a gain and looking insufferably calm about the whole thing.
And it wasn't just Berkshire offering shelter. Financial Services and Healthcare — two sectors that actually benefit from a "stronger economy, higher for longer" rate environment — posted positive gains on the week. Not every corner of the market was on fire; investors just had to know where to look.
One ugly Friday and one down week do not make a bear market. Corrections are healthy. They shake out the weak hands, reset expectations, and occasionally remind investors that stocks are supposed to go both directions.
The Week Ahead — Buckle Up
If last week felt eventful, the next few weeks are going to make it look like a warm-up act.
First on the docket: CPI drops mid-week, followed closely by PPI. After Friday's hot jobs number sent yields flying, these two reports are about as consequential as anything the market will see between now and the summer. A hotter-than-expected inflation print would pour more cold water on any remaining rate-cut dreams.
On the earnings front, Oracle and Adobe both report — two bellwethers that will either validate or further rattle the AI spending thesis. Both will have something important to say about enterprise tech demand, and Wall Street will be listening with its finger on the trigger.
And then there's SpaceX. The long-rumored IPO continues to build momentum, with the IPO pricing set for June 12th. The SpaceX IPO would be the most anticipated market debut in years — or will irrational exuberance remain to be seen?
All of this is prologue to the main event: the June 16th-17th FOMC meeting, the first chaired by new Fed Chair Kevin Marsh. Markets will be parsing every word, every pause, every raised eyebrow for clues about the path forward on rates. A new Fed Chair getting their baptism by fire in a rising-yield, post-hot-jobs environment? That's not just a policy meeting — that's must-watch television.
Stay tuned. The next few weeks may define the market's direction for the rest of the summer.
“The truth is that for too long, America had been asleep. We mistook comfort for strength. We treated efficiency as a substitute for resilience, and consumption as a measure of prosperity. We told ourselves that so long as goods were cheaper overseas, it did not matter whether factories went dark in Michigan, Ohio, or Pennsylvania. We assumed that supply chains would always function smoothly, adversaries would always behave responsibly, and the invisible hand would correct vulnerabilities that too few in public life had the courage to confront.”
- Remarks by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, 2026 Reagan National Economic Forum: While America Slept, May 29, 2026
Perspectives by Fiona Zhang
Dell: Beneath the Waterline
The visible portion of Dell's iceberg is hard to miss. In its most recent quarter, the company reported record revenue of $43.8 billion, AI-optimized server revenue of $16.1 billion, and an astonishing $24.4 billion in AI orders. Management now expects roughly $60 billion in AI server revenue this fiscal year as enterprises and hyperscalers continue to pour money into artificial intelligence infrastructure. Those numbers have helped transform Dell from a company many investors once associated with personal computers into one of Wall Street's favorite AI beneficiaries. If you glance at Dell today, what you see is a company riding one of the most powerful technology spending cycles in decades.
But that is only the portion above the waterline.
The temptation with every market darling is to assume that today's success explains itself. Investors see AI servers, NVIDIA chips, and exploding demand, then conclude that Dell's resurgence began with artificial intelligence. In reality, the company was being reshaped years before AI became the market's obsession. The deeper story begins not in a data center, but in a series of strategic decisions that many investors barely remember.
When Michael Dell took the company private in 2013, Dell was widely viewed as a mature hardware manufacturer struggling to find its next chapter. The PC business that had made the company famous was no longer the growth engine it once was, and few investors would have described Dell as a future technology leader. Taking the company private bought Michael Dell something valuable: time. Free from the scrutiny of quarterly earnings expectations, he could focus on rebuilding the company for a future that was still difficult to see.
That future took shape with the acquisition of EMC in 2016. At the time, most attention focused on the transaction's enormous size, roughly $67 billion, making it one of the largest technology acquisitions ever completed. Yet the most important asset in the deal was arguably not EMC itself, but VMware, the software company hidden inside it.
In hindsight, VMware may have been one of the most important pieces of the Dell story. While Dell's traditional businesses operated in highly competitive hardware markets, VMware possessed the kind of recurring revenue, customer loyalty, and software economics that investors typically reward with premium valuations. Through EMC, Dell gained control of an asset that would help support its balance sheet, provide strategic flexibility, and eventually play a crucial role in reducing debt after the VMware spin-off in 2021.
This is where the iceberg becomes visible — but the story did not end there.
In a twist that few could have predicted when Dell acquired EMC in 2016, VMware was eventually acquired by Broadcom in 2023. Perhaps the most interesting footnote is that Michael Dell himself emerged from that chain of events with a substantial ownership stake in Broadcom, making him one of the company's largest individual shareholders. Now think about it: Dell sells the servers that power AI workloads, while Broadcom provides much of the networking, custom silicon, and enterprise software that make those systems work. Though in the same industry, they're not direct competitors. They are different pieces of the same machine. As AI spending accelerates, Michael Dell is positioned not only through Dell Technologies but also through ownership in another company that benefits from the same trend. And looking back, it almost feels as if VMware spent a decade quietly creating value at every stop along the journey: first helping transform Dell, then helping strengthen Dell's balance sheet, and ultimately becoming part of another technology powerhouse that now sits at the center of the AI infrastructure buildout. For a deal that started with EMC nearly a decade ago, that is a surprisingly long shadow.
Seen through that lens, Dell's recent earnings report looks different. The record AI orders and surging server revenue are not the beginning of the story; they are the latest manifestation of a strategy that has been unfolding for more than a decade. Investors looking at Dell today see an AI winner. What they often miss is that beneath the surface lies a decade-long chain of decisions linking Dell, EMC, VMware, and Broadcom. The AI boom may explain why Dell is succeeding today, but it does not fully explain how Dell arrived here. For that, one has to follow the trail beneath the waterline.
Advisory services offered through Sowell Management, a Registered Investment Advisor. The views expressed represent the opinion of Sowell Management. The views are subject to change and are not intended as a forecast or guarantee of future results. This material is for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice and is not intended as an endorsement of any specific investment. Stated information is derived from proprietary and non-proprietary sources that have not been independently verified for accuracy or completeness. While Sowell Management believes the information to be accurate and reliable, we do not claim or have responsibility for its completeness, accuracy, or reliability. Statements of future expectations, estimates, projections, and other forward-looking statements are based on available information and Sowell Management’s view as of the time of these statements. Accordingly, such statements are inherently speculative as they are based on assumptions that may involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Actual results, performance or events may differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. Investing in securities involves risks, including the potential loss of principal. While equities may offer the potential for greater long-term growth than most debt securities, they generally have higher volatility. International investments may involve risk of capital loss from unfavorable fluctuation in currency values, from differences in generally accepted accounting principles, or from economic or political instability in other nations. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
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WEEK AHEAD
June 8-12, 2026
Sowell’s technical gauges remain quietly but firmly committed to a fully invested posture. Last week’s pullback may have interrupted Wall Street’s nine-week victory lap, but a single rough Friday does not invalidate months of improving market behavior. Markets occasionally remind investors that gravity still exists; the broader trend, however, remains intact. As always, our discipline is guided by evidence, not emotion, and the evidence continues to suggest that following the trend is a far more rewarding endeavor than following the day’s headlines.
Weekly Market Commentary:
A Thriller With No Lasting Villain
Markets came into the week surfing a remarkable wave. The S&P 500 had just posted its ninth consecutive weekly gain, a feat that's happened exactly four times in the last four decades. The Nasdaq 100 had ripped 10.6% in May alone. The Dow finally cracked 51,000. Earnings season was practically a victory lap — 85% of S&P 500 companies beat EPS estimates, blended earnings growth clocked in at 28.6% year-over-year, the best pace since Q4 2021. By every measure, the bulls had the ball, the crowd behind them, and the wind at their backs. Then Friday happened.
The Setup: Computex Euphoria
The week opened with genuine excitement. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang — currently operating at roughly the same cultural altitude as a rock star — delivered his keynote at Computex 2026 in Taipei. He unveiled Nvidia's RTX Spark, the company's first-ever PC processor, a move that sent NVDA up 4.8% and put Intel and AMD squarely in the crosshairs. Huang also declared, with characteristic modesty, that Marvell Technology could be "the next trillion-dollar company." Marvell's stock surged 25% on the quote alone. That's the power of having the right person say the right thing on the right stage.
Early in the week, the mood was positively electric. The S&P 500 notched a record close above 7,600 on Tuesday — a milestone that would have seemed audacious at the start of the year. The Dow tacked on 229 points. Ten consecutive weekly gains. Even the bears had to admit the market was earning it.
The Rug Pull: Broadcom's "Good Enough" Wasn't
Then Broadcom reported earnings Wednesday evening, and Wall Street collectively remembered that in a momentum-driven market, "exceeding expectations" is no longer sufficient. You must exceed expectations, raise guidance, offer a gift basket, and possibly promise to name a chip after someone's golden retriever.
Broadcom's numbers were, objectively, extraordinary. Revenue of $22.19 billion — up 48% year-over-year. EPS beat. Fiscal Q3 revenue guidance of $16 billion that would represent 84% year-over-year growth. By any rational measure, a company most investors would kill to own.
But analyst estimates had penciled in $17.2 billion in AI chip sales guidance. Broadcom gave them $16 billion. Worse, CEO Hock Tan declined to raise the full-year AI semiconductor sales forecast. The market, having priced in perfection, received merely excellence — and responded by wiping roughly $350 billion in market cap in a single session as Broadcom shares fell 14% on Thursday.
The contagion spread with brutal efficiency. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index plunged by more than 10% on Friday. Marvell — yes, the same Marvell that had surged 25% earlier in the week on Jensen Huang's blessing — cratered 16%. Micron fell 13%. Intel and AMD each dropped around 11%. Nvidia shed nearly 6%. The sector that had carried the broader market's advance all year was now leading the retreat, and it was taking everything with it.
The Accelerant: Jobs Day
If Broadcom lit the match, the May jobs report on Friday morning handed the market a can of gasoline.
Nonfarm payrolls came in at 172,000 for May — well above forecasts. Unemployment held steady at 4.3%. On paper, this is good news. A healthy labor market. Economic resilience. The kind of data that, in a normal cycle, would be cause for mild celebration.
However, "strong economy" is code for "the Fed isn't cutting rates anytime soon," and "the Fed isn't cutting rates" is code for "yields stay high," and "yields stay high" is code for "those richly valued AI names look a lot less attractive." The 10-year Treasury yield jumped back above 4.5%. The 30-year breached 5%. The VIX — Wall Street's fear gauge — exploded 34% higher on the day, finishing above 20 for the first time in months.
1 - Source https://home.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/TextView?type=daily_trea…
By the closing bell, the Nasdaq had fallen 4.18%, its worst single session since April 2025. The S&P 500 gave up 2.64%. The Dow, somewhat insulated by its old-economy composition, limited the damage to 1.35%. For the week, the S&P 500 surrendered more than 2% — erasing most of what had been a promising few days. The ten-consecutive-weekly-gains streak? Gone.
It wasn't a total bloodbath, though. Of the S&P 500's top 10 largest stocks, nine fell on the day — and then there was Berkshire Hathaway, sitting in the corner with a cup of coffee, posting a gain and looking insufferably calm about the whole thing.
And it wasn't just Berkshire offering shelter. Financial Services and Healthcare — two sectors that actually benefit from a "stronger economy, higher for longer" rate environment — posted positive gains on the week. Not every corner of the market was on fire; investors just had to know where to look.
One ugly Friday and one down week do not make a bear market. Corrections are healthy. They shake out the weak hands, reset expectations, and occasionally remind investors that stocks are supposed to go both directions.
The Week Ahead — Buckle Up
If last week felt eventful, the next few weeks are going to make it look like a warm-up act.
First on the docket: CPI drops mid-week, followed closely by PPI. After Friday's hot jobs number sent yields flying, these two reports are about as consequential as anything the market will see between now and the summer. A hotter-than-expected inflation print would pour more cold water on any remaining rate-cut dreams.
On the earnings front, Oracle and Adobe both report — two bellwethers that will either validate or further rattle the AI spending thesis. Both will have something important to say about enterprise tech demand, and Wall Street will be listening with its finger on the trigger.
And then there's SpaceX. The long-rumored IPO continues to build momentum, with the IPO pricing set for June 12th. The SpaceX IPO would be the most anticipated market debut in years — or will irrational exuberance remain to be seen?
All of this is prologue to the main event: the June 16th-17th FOMC meeting, the first chaired by new Fed Chair Kevin Marsh. Markets will be parsing every word, every pause, every raised eyebrow for clues about the path forward on rates. A new Fed Chair getting their baptism by fire in a rising-yield, post-hot-jobs environment? That's not just a policy meeting — that's must-watch television.
Stay tuned. The next few weeks may define the market's direction for the rest of the summer.
“The truth is that for too long, America had been asleep. We mistook comfort for strength. We treated efficiency as a substitute for resilience, and consumption as a measure of prosperity. We told ourselves that so long as goods were cheaper overseas, it did not matter whether factories went dark in Michigan, Ohio, or Pennsylvania. We assumed that supply chains would always function smoothly, adversaries would always behave responsibly, and the invisible hand would correct vulnerabilities that too few in public life had the courage to confront.”
- Remarks by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, 2026 Reagan National Economic Forum: While America Slept, May 29, 2026
Perspectives by Fiona Zhang
Dell: Beneath the Waterline
The visible portion of Dell's iceberg is hard to miss. In its most recent quarter, the company reported record revenue of $43.8 billion, AI-optimized server revenue of $16.1 billion, and an astonishing $24.4 billion in AI orders. Management now expects roughly $60 billion in AI server revenue this fiscal year as enterprises and hyperscalers continue to pour money into artificial intelligence infrastructure. Those numbers have helped transform Dell from a company many investors once associated with personal computers into one of Wall Street's favorite AI beneficiaries. If you glance at Dell today, what you see is a company riding one of the most powerful technology spending cycles in decades.
But that is only the portion above the waterline.
The temptation with every market darling is to assume that today's success explains itself. Investors see AI servers, NVIDIA chips, and exploding demand, then conclude that Dell's resurgence began with artificial intelligence. In reality, the company was being reshaped years before AI became the market's obsession. The deeper story begins not in a data center, but in a series of strategic decisions that many investors barely remember.
When Michael Dell took the company private in 2013, Dell was widely viewed as a mature hardware manufacturer struggling to find its next chapter. The PC business that had made the company famous was no longer the growth engine it once was, and few investors would have described Dell as a future technology leader. Taking the company private bought Michael Dell something valuable: time. Free from the scrutiny of quarterly earnings expectations, he could focus on rebuilding the company for a future that was still difficult to see.
That future took shape with the acquisition of EMC in 2016. At the time, most attention focused on the transaction's enormous size, roughly $67 billion, making it one of the largest technology acquisitions ever completed. Yet the most important asset in the deal was arguably not EMC itself, but VMware, the software company hidden inside it.
In hindsight, VMware may have been one of the most important pieces of the Dell story. While Dell's traditional businesses operated in highly competitive hardware markets, VMware possessed the kind of recurring revenue, customer loyalty, and software economics that investors typically reward with premium valuations. Through EMC, Dell gained control of an asset that would help support its balance sheet, provide strategic flexibility, and eventually play a crucial role in reducing debt after the VMware spin-off in 2021.
This is where the iceberg becomes visible — but the story did not end there.
In a twist that few could have predicted when Dell acquired EMC in 2016, VMware was eventually acquired by Broadcom in 2023. Perhaps the most interesting footnote is that Michael Dell himself emerged from that chain of events with a substantial ownership stake in Broadcom, making him one of the company's largest individual shareholders. Now think about it: Dell sells the servers that power AI workloads, while Broadcom provides much of the networking, custom silicon, and enterprise software that make those systems work. Though in the same industry, they're not direct competitors. They are different pieces of the same machine. As AI spending accelerates, Michael Dell is positioned not only through Dell Technologies but also through ownership in another company that benefits from the same trend. And looking back, it almost feels as if VMware spent a decade quietly creating value at every stop along the journey: first helping transform Dell, then helping strengthen Dell's balance sheet, and ultimately becoming part of another technology powerhouse that now sits at the center of the AI infrastructure buildout. For a deal that started with EMC nearly a decade ago, that is a surprisingly long shadow.
Seen through that lens, Dell's recent earnings report looks different. The record AI orders and surging server revenue are not the beginning of the story; they are the latest manifestation of a strategy that has been unfolding for more than a decade. Investors looking at Dell today see an AI winner. What they often miss is that beneath the surface lies a decade-long chain of decisions linking Dell, EMC, VMware, and Broadcom. The AI boom may explain why Dell is succeeding today, but it does not fully explain how Dell arrived here. For that, one has to follow the trail beneath the waterline.
1 Dell
Advisory services offered through Sowell Management, a Registered Investment Advisor. The views expressed represent the opinion of Sowell Management. The views are subject to change and are not intended as a forecast or guarantee of future results. This material is for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice and is not intended as an endorsement of any specific investment. Stated information is derived from proprietary and non-proprietary sources that have not been independently verified for accuracy or completeness. While Sowell Management believes the information to be accurate and reliable, we do not claim or have responsibility for its completeness, accuracy, or reliability. Statements of future expectations, estimates, projections, and other forward-looking statements are based on available information and Sowell Management’s view as of the time of these statements. Accordingly, such statements are inherently speculative as they are based on assumptions that may involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Actual results, performance or events may differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. Investing in securities involves risks, including the potential loss of principal. While equities may offer the potential for greater long-term growth than most debt securities, they generally have higher volatility. International investments may involve risk of capital loss from unfavorable fluctuation in currency values, from differences in generally accepted accounting principles, or from economic or political instability in other nations. Past performance is not indicative of future results.